United States v. Nicholas Panarella, Jr.

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that “state law offers a better limiting principle for purposes of determining when an official’s failure to disclose a conflict of interest amounts to honest services fraud”
• declaring that the “use of state law as a limiting principle defining the scope of honest services fraud” better addresses federalism concerns than the ambiguous standard of whether there was a misuse of office for personal gain
• noting that such formulations of fraud “do little to allay fears that the federal fraud statutes give inadequate notice of criminality and delegate to the judiciary impermissible broad authority to delineate the contours of criminal liability”
• emphasizing the need to establish a violation of state disclosure law, but not deciding whether such a violation was always necessary
• rejecting defendant's argument that the specific facts alleged in the superseding information did not amount to honest services wire fraud
• criticizing the rule permitting a defendant who enters an unconditional guilty plea to challenge on appeal the charging instrument’s failure to allege facts sufficient to state an offense

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).